Storme woke up crying three times in the night. Twice she had woken Crackle. At four o’clock in the morning Tamara dragged herself out of bed again. She stood at the side of the cot, shivering, and trying to quieten her little daughter before she woke him up for the third time.
“Don’t wake your dad, there’s a good girl,” she implored in a whisper. But Storme struggled up through the stinking blankets and held her arms up imploringly. Tamara saw the tears on her face by the moonlight filtering through the dirty net curtain at the window. She pushed the little girl down and arranged the blankets on top of her as best she could in the dark. Storme cried out again, a cry so terrible and so piercing that Crackle woke and sat up in bed, an angry shape in the dark.
“What the fuck?”
“S’alright. Go back to sleep,” said Tamara to him. She put her hand over Storme’s small mouth to try and stop the screams coming from her throat. But when she took her hand away the sound of Storme’s misery filled the room and caused Crackle to leap out of bed and run to the cot and grab Storme by the front of her damp pyjamas. He held her level to his face and shook her, using her body as punctuation for his words.
“Shut, the, fuck, up. Shut it!”
Tamara was so afraid of his anger, she thought that her heart would burst through her chest.
“Perhaps she’s poorly. I’ll take her in the living room,” she said, trying to wrestle the baby away from him. The screaming was more than she could bear.
“There’s nowt wrong with her, she’s just playing up,” he said, and he threw the little child on to the bed face down and punched her in the small of her back.
She cried even louder. He picked her up by her shoulders and shook her violently, trying to stop the noise that she was making. Her head cracked against the wall above the bed and she stopped crying.
“See,” said Crackle, handing Tamara the damp whimpering body, “she’s gotta learn.”
Tamara laid her daughter on the cot mattress and covered her tenderly with the blankets. She was glad that it was dark and that she was unable to see the baby’s face.
When she got into bed Crackle turned his back on her, but she could feel him breathing heavily from his exertions.
A feeling of dread kept her awake for a very long time, but eventually sleep overtook her and she half woke at dawn to find Crackle holding her belly, just as he had done when the baby had been inside her. It had been a good time. Crackle had insisted that she should attend every pre-natal appointment and had gone along with her. He kept the appointment card inside his wallet. He had punished her if she forgot to take her iron tablets. His face had been wet with tears when he had seen Storme lying on Tamara’s belly, still attached to the milky cord. He had rung Bilko to tell him the glad news.
“I’m telling you Bilko, it’s a fuckin’ miracle,” he had said into the pay phone at the end of the gleaming corridor.
Tamara had stayed in the maternity hospital for three days. She was the only woman in the ward not to have a bouquet of flowers from her partner on her bedside locker. Crackle didn’t believe in flowers. She pretended not to mind, but on the third night she pressed her face into the hospital pillowslip marked NHS in huge block letters, and cried. In the morning the pillow was stained with the black eye-liner and the make-up that Crackle thought was part of her face: he had never, to her knowledge, seen her without it.
Bilko drove the family back to their flat with great care; like a man with a fragile and precious cargo. Crackle sat in the front passenger seat jigging about excitedly, turning back occasionally to look at Storme, who lay asleep in Tamara’s arms. Bilko’s huge black face filled the driving mirror. He was a father himself. He knew that once the initial excitement of fatherhood was over Crackle would be looking for something else to fill his long workless days and nights. It was Crackle who had carried Storme over the splintered threshold of the flat. After the antiseptic sterility of the hospital, the smell in the flat made Tamara gag, but within a few hours she had accepted it again as being normal.
♦
The morning after that terrible night Tamara stood over the cot, looking down at Storme. She looked different, thought Tamara. She was floppy and her eyes looked strange; as if they’d been replaced in the night by those of an alien baby. She carried Storme into the living room and switched on the fan heater. She couldn’t wake her up, not properly.
She sat down on the decrepit sofa that the previous tenants had discarded. She rocked Storme in her arms until the room had warmed up, and then she took the baby’s clothes off. She was shocked when she saw the bruise on her back. It was the same colour as the spring cabbage her mother used to cook in the happy days. Tamara knew that nobody in authority must see the bruise, or the sores on the baby’s bottom that bled when she took off the sodden disposable nappy. She had a feeling that everything had gone too far, and that nothing would be the same ever again.
She wished that her mother was still alive. She would have known what to do. Tamara closed her eyes and remembered Snow White and a flock of bluebirds cleaning up the seven dwarfs’ cottage in the woods. They would come to her council flat and do the same for her. They, would put all the rubbish that had piled up under the sink into black plastic bags. Then they’d collect the used dirty pots that covered most surfaces in the flat and Snow White would soak them in hot water in the sink. Then the bluebirds would pick up the dirty clothes from the floors with their beaks and place them in bags, ready to be washed. Snow White would empty the ashtrays and scour the bathroom and toilet with Ajax, and sweep the accumulated debris from the floors. She’d clean the windows and ask the bluebirds to take down the ragged curtains and fly away with them. Then she’d sing that song and go round with a duster and Mr Sheen. Tamara opened her eyes and was almost surprised to find that Snow White and the bluebirds had not visited her, and that things were exactly the same.
Tamara couldn’t imagine what her mother would have said or done if she had seen what had happened to Storme’s body. Tamara hoped that her mother wasn’t looking down from heaven at herself and Storme sitting on the sofa. She closed her eyes at the thought and kissed the top of the baby’s head, softly so as not to wake her. It would be awful if she started to cry and woke Crackle. He was one of those people who needed his sleep. She would just have to sit quietly with the baby until he woke and shouted through for his coffee. She hoped it wouldn’t be long. She was a bit worried about the baby—she was breathing funny. Tamara stretched out her hand and grasped the cigarettes and matches from the armrest on the opposite end of the sofa. She lit a cigarette and kissed the baby’s head again. Smoke drifted across Storme’s face, making her cough, which Tamara took to be a good sign. It was the baby’s normal cough. The one she’d had for months.